Isaiah Jones vs the Sea: The Griot Run Aground Galveston Homecoming: Pre-Launch

December 11, 2024

Isaiah Jones vs the Sea: The Griot Run Aground Galveston Homecoming: Pre-Launch

Isaiah Jones vs. the Sea: The Griot Runs Aground; Galveston Homecoming: Pre-Launch Departure Inventory of Supplies, Gear, and Provisions

“Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down

Letting the days go by, water flowing underground

Into the blue again, into the silent water

Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground.”

—David Byrne

Isaiah was always close to the water. He was nearly born at sea when his mother’s water broke while she was visiting a friend’s moored cutter in the harbor near Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily. As soon as Helena recovered from giving birth to Isaiah and his sister, Emily, she returned to the sea. Helena and her husband, Kennedy, spent all their free time at the docks, sitting on the decks of catamarans, sloops, and cutters belonging to their friends between sails around the Mediterranean Sea. After the family moved to Dallas, he hung out at the neighbor’s heated pool year-round as a child, practicing holding his breath while swimming laps beneath the surface of the water.

For a while, he believed he might join the military like his parents and grandparents, using that as a way to go to sea. But that never happened; on his 16th birthday, when most kids received their first car, he got a boat instead. That may not sound like a radical idea if you grew up near a lake, a river, or an ocean. But this is Dallas, Texas, and there is nothing here to explain why Isaiah was drawn to the sea.

The story begins in Sicily when his parents, Helena Culpepper and Kennedy Jones, met again after dating for the three years they had both been stationed at GITMO together previously. Helena worked in the com-shack, intercepting and translating Russian and Spanish language radio signals and decoding communiqués. Kennedy was an engineer; he repaired and maintained the gear as well as designed improvements. They both spoke six languages and loved to spend their off time on the water—Kennedy fishing and Helena sailing. On their first date, the 6 foot 4 inch tall black marine invited the 5 foot 5 inch tall red headed squid from naval intelligence to his quarters on Marine hill, where they binge-watched a show neither had seen before, called Cowboy Bebop, on his computer monitor while they sat on his rack sipping white zinfandel and eating Chinese fried rice from the local takeout.

The diminutive redhead from Texas liked the lanky black nerd from California immediately. Helena thought he was cool because he used chopsticks to eat. She had already imagined what their children would look like and decided that their features would make a good match—they would have beautiful children, but this was not what she was expecting on a first date. Three years later, they were married the first weekend after they arrived at their new duty station in Sicily, where they remained for the next six years. On her 32nd birthday, Lt. Helena Elisabeth Culpepper Jones gave birth to twins, Emily Elisabeth and Isaiah Leonardo Jones.

It was in the deep cerulean waters of the Mediterranean, sailing with his mother aboard rented catamarans, that he first fell in love with sailing and the sea. Even now, with his irrational fear of any large open body of water, sharks, and endless possibilities for disaster, Isaiah “what if-ed” everything on the boat. He carried numerous spare parts he might need just in case; he worried about everything that could possibly go wrong—even pirates, bad weather, and big storms while on the water. The only way to survive at sea was to have a plan and be prepared for the worst. He brushed and flossed religiously because the last thing you want is to need medical attention at sea a thousand miles away from everything.

So, how did he end up here on this 44-foot-long prototype sailboat, serendipitously christened by the original owner the SS Exodus? That summer, after he graduated from SMU—the same university where his parents and his best friend’s parents all taught—he moved onto the boat, still in dry dock in the Port of Galveston.

Helena Culpepper had just been promoted to lieutenant in the Navy when she met his father, who had just made Warrant Officer after serving 13 years enlisted as an NCO in the Marine Corps. Both were stationed at GITMO, a naval base in Cuba. After they rotated out of Guantanamo, they met again in Sicily at the naval air base, where they married, and Helena gave birth to their two children, twins Emily and Isaiah.

It was during this time that Isaiah first learned to sail in the beguiling waters of the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Sicily, near the naval air base where he and his sister Emily were born and raised until the age of six. After his parents retired from the armed forces, Helena continued his nautical lessons on White Rock Lake in the tiny 10- to 15-foot sailboats and dinghies that skimmed across the small lake. All manner of watercraft could be found on the lake: paddle boats, sailboards, rowboats, canoes, and kayaks; everything was allowed except powered vehicles.

Over the next ten years, Isaiah learned to read a compass, use a sextant, and read the stars to navigate by starlight. He had star charts and navigational charts from NOAA on every wall and shelf in his bedroom; there were charts, maps, compasses, sextants, chronometers, and diving watches. The only thing in his room not related to his obsession with sailing was his ‘mu ren zhuang,’ also called Muk Yan Jong. The wooden man was the literal English translation; besides being part of his morning exercise and training ritual, it was his favorite way to relax and blow off steam when he was in a mood.

The drive from Dallas to Galveston was fun for Isaiah as he counted down the miles to the port. The family stopped everywhere for food at local eateries, took pictures next to tourist attractions, or just took a moment to stretch their legs as they took in the scenery. This would be their last summer vacation together, although they didn’t know it at the time.

Isaiah had read his father’s copy of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe when he was six, and maybe that was what cemented the idea in his mind as they took the transatlantic MAC flight from Sigonella Naval Air Station across the Atlantic to Norfolk and then to the National Guard base in Grand Prairie, a western suburb of Dallas. Over the course of the long flights, he reflected that the Pan-Africanist Franz Fanon, Muammar Gaddafi, and Marcus Garvey were right, and that it was time—time to go to Africa. Fanon kept repeating in his mind, “Morning, it touches the nerves quickly as if we were already in the hunter’s sights. the body yawns and stretches in the light. The pilgrimage is about to begin.”

-Frantz Fanon ‘The Wretched of the Earth’”

Isaiah would spend the next ten years living in Dallas, Texas, but America never felt like home. He often asked himself, why was he American, exactly? It was an interesting construct. He was born in Sicily, but since his parents were American military personnel, he was born on a military base that counted as U.S. soil. It felt like a global game of the floor is lava. It was an odd construct of citizenship—who is one and who is not? He had spent the first half of his life living there when Emily was still alive.

His engineering/physics degree from Dedman College at SMU landed him a part-time consulting job with Tartarus Aerospace as a Principal Systems Engineer – Space Suit (Hybrid). The corporate headhunter originally approached Isaiah with an offer of a $100,000 signing bonus and $200,000 per year. Isaiah laughed and told him the Navy was offering that much, so they added $50,000, bumping the bonus to $150,000. When the company showed the contract to his parents, the Joneses negotiated an additional $25,000 and no more than 20 hours a week remote to his annual salary.

The company was eager to snap up the high-functioning autistic math prodigy because he had sent in an idea for changing the prop design created by AI, which was lighter and faster, as well as some ideas he had for modifications to the design based on his work on ion thrusters. The idea would save them billions of dollars once implemented throughout the company. He would later install the new ribbon-shaped prop on his own boat, as well as the ship’s drones—a modification he would later add to the prototype Ti-44 Monarch.

The company’s owner and senior engineer was a barrel-built, bespectacled man with shoulder-length white hair, in his early 70s, with slowly worsening glaucoma. In their weekly virtual meetings, Theodore McCabe—Teddy, as he preferred to be called—often drawled as he spoke to the younger engineer Isaiah that it was good to have young eyes on things. The bifocal-wearing old Texan still drove his Ford F150 pickup to the factory every day and would sit in his office, poring over massive tomes using his heavy reading glasses, occasionally a magnifying glass for detail or tiny fonts. He picked up the large magnifying glass while waiting for whatever team of engineers he employed to come in with that day.

Isaiah read the documents the old man had given him on his first day when they met at his office the day after Isaiah arrived in Galveston. It was an engineering manual of the Apollo lunar program (What Made Apollo a Success). It was a collection of the system’s programs—the scientist’s playbook. Teddy thought along the same lines as Isaiah’s dad, Kennedy. He always told him there was no need to reinvent the wheel, but there was room for improvement. His days were spent designing next-generation spacesuits for NASA, SpaceX, and the European space program, careful not to work too many hours to risk violating Texas child labor laws or incur the ire of Granny Culpepper.

Nights and weekends were devoted to prepping the ship, gathering provisions, and refining the details of his trip to Ghana from Galveston. Timing would be everything for the Atlantic crossing; he planned to depart during the winter to take advantage of the good weather and favorable winds. Over the years, he learned that the best season for sailing in the Caribbean was late December until early May—after hurricane season and before the misty months at the beginning of summer. The Caribbean was a good place to sail year-round, except during hurricane season from August to September. He had sailed all over the Bahamas and the Caribbean with his family often during summer breaks, although the best time to sail the Eastern Caribbean from St. Thomas to Grenada was from March to June.

The first night out of the docks on board the Exodus, as he motored the Monarch Ti-44 out of the harbor to begin her shakedown run to the Keys, he ran the ship aground on a sandbar less than a half-mile away from the dock where she had been moored for the last seven months after misreading the buoy markers. It was dark except for the light of the waning gibbous moon and the distant lights of the harbor and the elevated highway above. He needed to inspect the boat below the waterline to be sure the hull and keel were not damaged.

He could have easily picked up the phone or gotten on the radio to call a tugboat to pull him out of this jam, but this felt too humiliating. Besides, there would be no tugs where he was going, so he rationalized and chalked the experience up to good practice. His soul-crushing fear of the dark water caused his heart rate to increase as he grabbed his snorkel gear, put on goggles and flippers, and carefully climbed down into the cool, dark water. The sounds of the surf and the traffic passing over on the nearby Interstate Highway 45 bridge disappeared as his head submerged beneath the surface of the murky waters.

He hated the silence of submersion in the sea. Even though the water was only 30 feet deep at its deepest in this part of the port, averaging only 10 feet deep in the ICW/Intracoastal waterway, the way his ears popped, combined with the loss of his sense of hearing, limited vision, and slowed movement, terrified him to some degree every time he entered an open body of water. Isaiah turned on the waterproof flashlight and then pointed it in the same direction as the speargun. He felt the weight of the diving knife strapped to his right thigh even through the wetsuit.

He swam from the stern down to the keel, now jammed firmly into the sand, before swimming to the bow. He surfaced, tossed the speargun up onto the deck, took a deep breath, then swam beneath the 44-foot length of the boat to surface at the bow, inspecting the hull for damage and relieved that there was none.

After he was confident about the boat’s condition and certain of her seaworthiness—assessing that the boat, while stuck in the sand, was undamaged—he swam aft, climbed out of the water, and returned to the ship’s deck. Sitting on the bench, he exhaled a great sigh of relief as he removed the diving gear and stored it. all the while, the puppy patrolled the deck, following him as he busied himself thinking about how stupid and lucky he had been.

Now, he needed only to wait around for the next 11 hours for the tide to come in and then get back on course. That night, he couldn’t sleep, so he poured over the maps and Mercator charts, plotting sheets, and NOAA charts, noting the longitude and latitude of the various Caribbean islands he would visit before crossing the Atlantic.

Isaiah sipped a cup of Bigelow’s Constant Comment green tea as he perused the old maps and waited for the rising tide to lift the small boat. Starbuck had busied herself trotting fore and aft, patrolling the length of the deck while he was in the water. The pup, now seven-and-a-half months old, parked herself at his feet while he studied the maps, as he had so often spent his evenings for the last ten years.

His thoughts meandered back to the first night they spent in Galveston and the conversation with Aeon about the nature of America. She said, “For us black people loving America will always end in tragedy.” History was on her side. The only opposition had no skin in the game. He had seen generations of men in his family have their hearts broken after serving this country. He had an advantage they did not: his eidetic memory and mathematical obsession; a manifestation of his autism gave him the calculation that brought insight into the story, an eloquent equation other radicals simply could not see. He studied our history and did the math, and after examining the sum of the equations, he set sail for Africa.

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